Litecoin price surges in 2017 and still rising

Litecoin price has skyrocketed in the last week. Jumping 111% on the back of the bitcoin futures market opening in America.

Litecoin is on an even crazier tear over the past month and year, skyrocketing more than 500% in the past 30 days and 10,000% in the past 12 months with Litecoin prices breaching $320 for the first time Tuesday. Since the start of 2017, Litecoin has risen 7,291% against bitcoin’s 1,731%.

It’s a big move for this crypto. That said, the price ramp here is probably more of a reflection of the swelling crypto market as whole rather than any news from the coin itself. And Litecoin’s performance does tend to follow bitcoin’s.

This strong, positive relationship makes sense. Litecoin is essentially a ‘spin-off’ of bitcoin. One of the several clone cryptocurrencies that stemmed from Bitcoin, Litecoin “forked” off the Bitcoin ledger in late 2011. It was intended to be the silver to Bitcoin’s gold: a faster, more lightweight version of the Satoshi Nakamoto-created cryptocurrency. Instead of the approximately 10 minutes it takes for a Bitcoin transaction, a Litecoin transaction only takes 2.5 minutes.

While making transactions four times faster, Litecoin’s creator also Charlie Lee quadrupled the maximum number of coins that can be mined. While bitcoin has a total of 21 million, Litecoin totals 84 million. And the total market value of Litecoin is currently lower: $18 billion to Bitcoin’s $291 billion. It is the fourth largest cryptocurrency market behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin cash.

The huge rise in Litecoin’s market cap and price point reflects the overall growth in cryptocurrency adoption globally throughout 2017. The increase has been so substantial that the current market cap of Litecoin is more than the entire market cap of all cryptocurrencies combined at the start of the year.

Part of the growth in cryptocurrency investment comes from investors shifting out of traditionally stable investment vehicles, like gold, to dip their toes in the crypto-waters.

One reason why Litecoin supporters didn’t ditch the nascent coin for Bitcoin is the different mining process, requiring hardware that is more widely available. While Bitcoin mining uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, which requires ASIC microchip technology, Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm. Because Scrypt requires a larger working memory, most ASICs makers have been barred from developing a suitable technology. Instead, Litecoin is often mined on graphics cards or GPUs.

But others argue that bitcoin and rival cryptocurrencies will continue to gain in popularity for both spending purposes and as investments.
To that end, the Chicago Board Options Exchange launched futures trading for bitcoin on Sunday, a move that makes bitcoin potentially more attractive to large institutional investors in the same way that oil, sugar and other physical commodities are.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange is set to begin trading bitcoin futures on December 18 as well. And the Nasdaq is said to be considering following in the footsteps of the CBOE and CME too and could start to trade bitcoin futures next year.